I agree with most of your poiunts and have seen many first-hand having worked for large, mid-zized and small organizations in IT for the past 20+ years. I have also worked for some of the Outsourcers you single out and agree that its hard to see their value in many cases.

Regarding your point #4 - Detailed Plans Are the Enemy, I would have liked this point "fleshed out" a little more. What is your opinion regarding Project Management Methodologies like the PMI which largly focus on very large, detailed and projects?

The larger the company the more likely that ROI will be demanded. Scale is the real problem. A company is itself a social network and once it grows past a certain size, it can't trust that each node will act responsibly. Demanding ROI is the trust safety net. And few question whether there are huge holes in it.

It's funny how easily we can humanize bureaucracy or process heaviness by just framing it as a trust-building exercise.

I was on a panel recently discussing internal social networking projects, and the topic turned to ROI. I argued a lot of these have to be a leap of faith -- that you just aren't going to get a hard ROI on something as fuzzy as getting people to share ideas and collaborate better. But there was a sense that ROI still must be calculated at most companies.

Pat - Great point on intrapeneurs. Very interesting trend and ultimately, an indictment that IT lacks the credibility with their stakeholders when it comes to delivering adjacent and edge technologies quickly. Look for references in future columns to "elves."

Nice article and just goes to show you can do anything with software:) I borrowed that from the guy who wrote the sub prime software that all the banks used and modeled for their trillions in profit. If you have never seen the documentary Quants, the Alchemists of Wall Street, watch it. Mike Osinski is the one why made the comment and he's in the movie and makes a good point on how some of what we see is vaporware and twisted code.

Right now we have a data mining epidemic going on to where they don't know when to stop and are in search of some non linear model and algorithms that will "save the day"...Models that lie in other words...I talk about it in healthcare and I call it Algo Duping.

I have to very whole-heartedly agree with point 3. It's not necessarily about multi-year projects, but about finding the proper solution when a need is identified.

For example, one organization that I'm quite well acquainted with has multiple "Enterprise Knowledge Management Platforms". Okay, so what's the problem with that? Cohesiveness, or lack thereof. Let's start from the beginning - when a new user gets on-boarded, they're bombarded with a list of URLs and sets of credentials for all of these platforms. As they progress, they start using the platforms and keep asking questions about where to find X, Y and Z. Meanwhile, X, Y and Z are on different platforms, but the user has to gather all of the information together, synthesize and report - thereby creating more content and having to choose which system to use to store it, since it has to be somewhere that everyone can get to. Now, wasn't the whole idea behind using an Enterprise Knowledge Management Platform to have a SINGLE place in the enterprise where all users can find and store all of the information that they work with? Instead, you have users who have to search through multiple, disparate knowledge sources - even ones that are considered depricated, legacy, "soon to be retired", etc. Meanwhile, all of them keep getting used and worker productivity drops like a stone.

What it boils down to, in this case, why worry about choosing a system to implement if you know that you're not going to be directly responsible for that choice by the time the organization realizes it wasn't the right one? If you're not going to be held accountable for a decision in three years, should you really be empowered to make that decision?

What is going on here????? These numbers have not moved for years and years!!!! Wasn't CASE suppossed to help? Waht about SOA/BPM?? What about agile? Can it just be a matter of organizational issues? I don't think so. Frankly the reason I am reacting so excitedly is that I have worked for the companies that sell a lot of those technologies. If they are really utilized as intended they would change the picture significantly (well, except agile). What I see as a real problem in the corporate software development world is a combination of the professional and personel issues mentioned with a lack of proper education or professional certification.

We often have people with computer science degrees or business degrees doing this work. What we really need is more people with software engineering degrees and certifications. I personally have a BS in Computer Science, but I have a lot of experience with software engineering, having gotten involved before software engineering degrees were offered. I am also a fan of certifications like the IEEE CSDP. I am also a member of the IEEE.

I also get upset about this issue because I worked at a few very advanced software development shops. We did not have these problems. We tracked software development very tightly and were able to estimate new projects very accurately. We were also able to manage them to completion through some techniques that I see filtering into approaches such as the PMP process just now. I was using them over 20 years ago.

Agreed on the five listed. Expanding on them: Sales people are under pressure to replace the existing with the new, regardless of whether the existing has a problem or not and regardless of whether the new is actually better, or just new. So sales people sell the sizzle and not the features or benefits...and certainly not the solutions their bullets claim. They tell the buyers "Buy this new technology and all your problems will be solved." The buyer is looking for a scapegoat. It's politically safer to blame the existing technology than blame the application and database designs and the coding and testing of the people you still have to work with. Whether a code generator or a performance monitor or project management tool, the manager who bought the sales pitch will ask the workers "Well did the tool fix the problem?" as if the code generator could fix the problem of a poorly designed application, or the performance monitor actually fixed the performance problem.

I believe I have seen all five of these at some point in my career and agree they are top contributors to project failure. The cost consciousness and reductions in IT over the past few years have left some internal IT departments with overtasked skeleton crews and greater dependence on outsourcing. Number five however does not have to be the proverbial loaded gun. Two actions I think can mitigate the effects indicated in the article and reduce this risk. First, evaluate your outsourcing staff members as if you were hiring them (get their resumes if necessary). Depending on the outsourcer they can provide microspecialists which do nothing other than installing and configuring the HW/SW for your project. This experience can greatly reduce delays from testing/development to operations. Second, identify one FTE to shadow the contractor. Your internal staff can then perform the "lights on" maintenance and operation of the system once the keys are past. Naturally it all depends on the specific project, but these two actions have helped.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.